Things are getting a little more interesting in the ref dept now, in more ways than one. So far:

• Where can I find articles about Pisistratus, classical tyrant? And once I find those articles in L'Annee Philologique, how do I know whether they're in English?
• What do you call that musk you're wearing? (This from an intense, creepy older man who then regaled me with apocryphal/revisionist Genesis outtakes.)
• Where can I find an African-American periodical from the period between 1870 and 1900? (This was a fun one, because just this summer I wrote an article on the history of African-American literary periodicals for an encyclopedia from Greenwood. I gave the student a copy of my Excel spreadsheet and the draft article, including a bibliography of suggested readings. Direct to the end user! Sure, yes, we also covered catalog searching and APS.)
• Where can I find copies of the Register-Guard from 2000?
• Where are the books on reserve for my class? (Over and over and over...)
• Where can I find information about someone named Louis Sylvestre, who was French? (No more information, except that he may have been an artist. Turns out he was 17th century, actually named Louis de Silvestre. And pretty obscure. No offense to Silvestrians.)
• Why can't I get free access to this online article in the journal Constellations, even though I'm seeing all the citation details in ingenta?
• How can I locate a dictionary of anatomy in the reference collection?
• How do I get into the online OED from off campus?

High point: a student in my class dropped by to say hi, and that she was enjoying the readings we've been giving them. I said great! Good luck with those scintillating articles on LC classification for Thursday!